Posts Tagged ‘Cordoba Center’

On the anniversary of 9/11 I found myself at a baby shower, thrown by two of the conductors of the trains I ride for two of the passengers. Sixty people were there, forty-five of them from the train community. We laughed, we played games, had a couple of glasses of wine, watched the mothers receive gifts and visited among ourselves. The somber background of the day was not forgotten. On the radio in the morning there was the backdrop of the reading of the names, the remembrance of the gloriously, sweet, beautiful day that was 9/11/2001, a day that could not have been more beautiful, a day that was in perfect juxtaposition to the horror of the day.

At the party, people talked of it, the anniversary. Many commented that there were an unusual number of social events planned for the day. Several at the baby shower had more than one invitation to a social event and there was speculation that many people were holding special events that day because they wanted to leap over the pain of that day, to begin to imprint upon their brains some happier memories – and yet all felt a little a guilty about doing something pleasurable on 9/11. It is a somber day, a holy day in some ways, a day that may remain with us for always as a secular Good Friday, a day in which we will remember the terror that changed our world, forever.

And, at the same time, people are struggling to have life go on in this new reality, which includes terror and tension, fear and fright. Because on September 11, babies are born and folks pass from this earth, love needs to be celebrated and we have to come to terms with the great pain of 9/11 and the reality that the world continues on. Perhaps that’s why this year, more than in years past, there were parties on 9/11, because people are beginning to integrate the reality, the horror of 9/11 into the calendar of their lives.

It was the following day that I felt the spirit, the ethos of 9/11 more than I did on the day itself. I had to return to the city from the cottage early so that I could help with video coverage of a march organized by Religious Freedom USA. Founded by two young men, one a rabbinical student and the other an evangelical Christian, it has devoted itself to fighting intolerance of religious groups in America and right now their focus is on Muslims because they are the group receiving the brunt of intolerance right now.

The day started with speeches at St. Peter’s Catholic Church, around the corner from the proposed Cordoba Center, buildings united, said the pastor of St. Peter’s, by the fact that both were damaged by debris from the same plane hitting the World Trade Center. Josh Stanton, the Jewish half of the founding team, recalled the story told him by his still living grandmother who, as a child, found herself huddled in her home with her parents as a mob surged through the streets of lower Manhattan, ranting as they went, torches in hand, that it was time to kill the Jews.

He was organizing because he did not want a surging mob in the streets calling for the killing of Muslims. At the end of the speeches, there was a mile long march through the streets of lower Manhattan, through the rain, past places in the process of rebuilding, rebuilding from that terrible day that has shifted history. Walking with them brought all of that day back to me and brought back all the weeks following and all the horror, standing on a friend’s rooftop, staring down into the still smoking pit, a miasma of broken buildings and lives, smoldering weeks later, still spewing death.

But out of that horror, out of that smoldering cauldron, the resultant mix should not be hate and bigotry. We should have learned something from our mistake of putting Japanese Americans in camps during WWII, that not all members of a group are the same. My mother told me of our family attempting to downplay our German background during World War I [and II?] because of fear that people would think we were one with the ones we were fighting. Let us look at our history and learn from the mistakes made and do our best not to repeat them.

Sitting down to write this evening, I find myself in a predicament – the most important thing that happened this week, which I find myself wanting to write about puts me in the middle of one of the great controversies of the moment.

This past Friday I was asked by Odyssey, my bread and butter client, to attend a meeting regarding the hugely controversial Cordoba House, the Muslim center proposed for a site two blocks from Ground Zero. Disturbed by the clamor that has arisen and the vitriol tossed about, Robert Chase, the head of a not for profit group called Intersections, which is an interfaith organization which is a member of the Odyssey family, called a meeting of other interfaith organizations to discuss the issue. And Odyssey was one of the invitees.

It was a small group, thirty or so that gathered Friday morning at the Intersections office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I was struck by the fact that half the attendees were from the Jewish community in New York and were among the most concerned about the tenor of the dialogue surrounding the Cordoba Center.

This is a controversy that has risen to national prominence over the last few weeks, inspiring some really hateful things being said about the individuals involved with the Cordoba Center. As I headed to the meeting I read the New York Post while on the subway, a conservative newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is a tabloid and is as close as we get in the 21st Century to the “Yellow Journalism” of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. It is doing everything it can to swirl the Cordoba Center situation into a full-blown crisis of national proportions.

The Murdoch organization, owner also of Fox News, is doing all it can, it seems to me, to imitate William Randolph Hearst in its playing of the matter. [Don’t remember William Randolph Hearst? With his newspapers he probably single handedly stirred the country up to engage in the Spanish American War after the battleship Maine mysteriously sank in Havana’s harbor. Remember the Maine! was the battle cry and the U.S. got Cuba for awhile after that and the Philippines too – for about forty years until they became independent after WW II.]

This Cordoba “crisis” is a complicated thing. It’s been planned for years but only now has it become a cause celeb for Fox News and the rest of the Murdoch organization. Nine months ago they were pretty benign about it, treating it pretty much as a non-event until there was the smell of blood in the water.

One local politician is publicly calling Islam a “terrorist organization” which it isn’t. It’s a religion in which there are some pretty scary organizations that are terrorists. But not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all Christians are good. Some Christians do some pretty despicable things. Christianity and particularly my tradition, Catholicism, have done some pretty horrific things along history’s way.

Last Thursday I had a conversation with a young woman, a Hindu journalist pursuing a story in Pakistan on the dichotomy there between the secular and radical Islam, of how that country is being torn apart and that, as she sees it, Islam is being hijacked by radical elements that have arisen over the last thirty years, since about the time of the fall of the Shah. And these folks are really, really, really scary. I acknowledge that. I find them terrifying.

But that is not every Muslim. They are not my Muslim friends, who have endured hard things since 9/11. There are Muslims to be feared. But not every Muslim. There are Christians to be feared. But not every Christian. Have we so quickly forgotten that Timothy McVeigh, who committed the largest act of domestic terrorism prior to 9/11, was not a Muslim but from the Christian tradition?

The tarring of an entire religion with a label so powerful should give us cause to think hard, very hard.